Tag Archives: the visitor

The teenagers that I teach grow up in a relatively small provincial Dutch town or the villages in the fields around it. It is essentially, and for most, a very secure and familiar background. The task of showing these young people that they have a place in a bigger picture, a global village if you like, is at times a difficult challenge. A colleague put it something like…”it’s difficult to take our school into the big wide world, but maybe we can bring the world into the school”.

I would definitely connect with such an aim. As a visual arts teacher I see my function to stimulate the pupils’ enthusiasm for art, develop their practical abilities and to show how art and culture has a contribution to make in helping us to engage with important issues around us.

It is with these sorts of thoughts in mind that I have been designing and teaching a series of lessons to my 15 and 16 year olds about how the subject of how illegal immigration has been dealt in the arts. I make use of the work of two Dutch visual artists, the excellent huge scale drawings called Faith, Fear, Face by Carlijn Mens and the photographs Henk Wildschut. I have written about the relevance of their work before on my blog.

This year though I have also added the film The Visitor, written and directed by Thomas McCarthy

All three in their various forms give us insight into the lives of illegal immigrants in European or American contexts. All three are fine examples of how various cultural disciplines can engage us with important social and political issues of our time.

I feel very confident of the quality of my examples and indeed of my lesson material. Yet somehow, this year perhaps more than in previous years, I don’t quite feel like the message is getting through. When I reflect a little on this situation my conclusion is that perhaps for too many in my current groups the intellectual and emotional step that they must make to reach an appreciation of the plight of illegal immigrants is just too big. They’re aware of the problem, they’ve heard it mentioned in the news, but it’s just not their issue. It all seems a million miles away from their daily bike ride to school, the hockey club and shelf stacking in the local supermarket. I am asking them to be ready to make that conceptual leap and to tune in to the bigger picture. There are a few in the groups I teach who are ready and willing to try to do this, but I have to be honest, I feel with plenty of others I am struggling to help them make this switch. At times there almost seems to be a pride in some in choosing to not engage. They simply don’t feel it is a world that has anything at all to do with their existence.

The truth is, that in some ways they are right. At the moment the connection is slight, an article on the news, a film in a lesson at school. And yet, for some the possible moment when they are confronted with the laws and issues of immigration could be closer than they think, as I’ve been trying to make clear this week. Most of the same pupils out of my classes will, in three or four years time be safely embedded in University life. Many are likely to find themselves doing courses that offer the chance to do placements or work experience in some pretty exotic places. I also know, from my own experience, that such trips can also, from time to time, result in meeting new people and forming emotional relationships that will take them to areas where the state might start to have something to say about the way they want to live their personal lives. My own story of immigration from England to the Netherlands grew out of exactly this sort of scenario and had its own moments of difficulties and frustration, but these were not nearly so complex as those experiences encountered by a friend who met his wife whilst on a visit to Peru and ultimately wanted to return to the Netherlands with his new partner. Their situation turned out to be a much longer and complicated affair.

As a teacher you dip into all these sorts of personal resources to try and make your point when teaching. But the simple truth is that so much can happen, and so much has to be learnt as an adolescent becomes an adult. Mainstream education has a part to play, you try to lodge some useful baggage in the back of the minds of your learners, to give them some perspectives and insight that might be useful to them in the future. But as a teacher, you also have to accept that it is often a case of planting acorns and hoping for oak trees, you might, but perhaps more likely, you might not be there to see it happen.

Two months later I wrote the following post reflecting on what I wrote above: